PressEthic

President Bush has never been applauded for his rhetorical skills, but his recent, contradicting statements about Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation have given way to particularly vocal criticism in the press.

Before the election, President Bush had announced that both Rumsfeld and Cheney would stay on for the rest of his term. Thus, during last Wednesday’s press conference, he was called to explain not only Rumsfeld’s departure itself, but the contradicting information that he had provided the media a few days prior.

When faced with the inevitable question, President Bush said that before the day of the press conference, the decision about Rumsfeld’s replacement had not yet been finalized. Furthermore, he had deliberately chosen not to announce such a major decision on the eve of the election.

President Bush told media representatives:

“And my answer was, they're going to stay on. And the reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.

The truth of the matter is, as well -- I mean, that's one reason I gave the answer, but the other reason why is I hadn't had a chance to visit with Bob Gates yet, and I hadn't had my final conversation with Don Rumsfeld yet at that point.”

According to the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz, the President could hypothetically either be applauded for facing up to the criticism or reprimanded for allowing this slip-up to happen in the first place:

"Did the president of the United States make a rare admission on national television that he had told an untruth?” asked Kurtz in this past Friday’s Washington Post, “or had he merely engaged in a dodge of the sort that is common in politics?”

Kurtz reported:

“The president added that he had not made a definitive decision because he had not held his "last" conversation with Rumsfeld and had not yet spoken to Robert Gates, his nominee to take over the Pentagon.

Was that on par with President Bill Clinton's hair-splitting defense in the Monica S. Lewinsky investigation that "it all depends on what the definition of is is"? White House press secretary Tony Snow, asked about the matter yesterday, told reporters that "there were conversations going on" with Rumsfeld about quitting at the time of Bush's Nov. 1 interview. Snow said in an interview that Bush was not misleading the wire reporters because "he had not reached a final decision." "He was not going to use that announcement to try to score political points" and would not be "jerked around into making decisions on the basis of politics," Snow said.

But wasn't saying that Rumsfeld would stay on also a form of scoring political points? Snow said that news organizations were "quibbling" over the wording and that "people understand the practicalities" of the situation.”

According to Kurtz, President Bush has now entered the dangerous, if historically common, territory of having his truthfulness questioned. Withholding information from the public is naturally a controversial strategy, but what really ticks people off is denying that these secrets exist in the first place. In short, lying is worse than simply not providing the truth.

“Presidents' reputations have been tarnished by growing public doubts about their veracity -- Lyndon B. Johnson over Vietnam, Richard M. Nixon over Watergate, Ronald Reagan over the Iran-contra scandal and Clinton over the Lewinsky affair. But every president employs rhetorical devices -- such as refusing to answer hypothetical questions -- when asked about news that he is not ready to announce. Sometimes that can get tricky.

Joe Lockhart, who was Clinton's press secretary from 1998 to 2000, said he was surprised that Bush would "get up and say, 'I didn't tell you that because it wasn't convenient for me to tell the truth.' It's a stunning admission that when something is politically inconvenient, you don't have to be straightforward."”

This particular slip-up is only the tip of the iceberg, and the President may thus have lost the straightforward reputation that he held earlier in his presidency:

“Whereas Clinton was long saddled with an image of being slippery, "Bush came into the White House with the reputation of being a straight shooter and was given the benefit of the doubt," Lockhart said. But after Bush's repeated insistence that things are going well in Iraq and his initial defense of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, Lockhart said, "that's gone."

Ron Nessen, President Gerald Ford's spokesman, said he advised public figures to "always tell the truth," or else "you're going to get caught a lot of the time and have to explain your way out of it, and that hurts your credibility."

Americans are likely to understand by now that most political information is released to the public in a carefully packaged manner. What should make us uneasy, however, is watching PR take priority over our leaders’ assumed commitment to veracity.

Then again, perhaps it would be naiive of us to expect anything different.

Kurtz article

Bush's press conference transcript